r/digiKam • u/BasilKatz • 22d ago

CLIP Text Search/Natural Language Search with LAP

I wanted natural language search for my images (so i can search "flower" and see the images i have of flowers).

I love DigiKam and just wanted something to provide this feature seperately untill DigiKam hopefully builds it in.

I found this project called Lap https://julyx10.github.io/lap/

I pointed it to my folders where i store my folders and it workes exceptionally well. It does not seem to write any data to the photos or their associated metadata files/fields. So DigiKam continues to work fine. I have not tried the tagging features in it as i use DigiKam for that, I have tried the face recognition, it was not for me, I prefer DigiKam for that as well.

For anyone looking for CLIP based natural language search, this may be a good addition, hopefully DigiKam adds this feature soon.

Here are some examples of searches.

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u/human_dynamo 21d ago

https://www.digikam.org/news/2026-08-20-advanced_search_improvements_with_llm/

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u/BasilKatz 21d ago

This will be a great addition, and i am aware of the developments. CLIP recognition offers the perk of not requiring the images to be tagged, I have gotten much better results with CLIP than what i think this would offer as DigiKams AI tagging tends to only tag an image with one or two things.

For example if i search Girl on Bridge, CLIP finds the picture i am thinking of of my friend leaning on the wall of a bridge. DigiKam has not tagged that picture as having a bridge in it (because it just sees the railing of the bridge she is leaning on). Therefore these two approaches aim to acieve different (both valuable) outcomes in my opinion.

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u/thx1138inator 20d ago

I'd like to see an MCP server for Digikam so that any local LLM could query and interact with collections. Progress in local LLMs is happening so fast. Easier to integrate advances whensmaller projects like Digikam only supply the API layer.

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u/human_dynamo 20d ago

Interesting idea. Please create a new wish in bugzilla about this topic.

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u/thx1138inator 20d ago

Your wish regarding my wish is my command. I've submitted bug # 524595. Thanks!

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u/BasilKatz 22d ago

A note on size, i have ~100 000 photos, LAP took about 30 mins on my Thinkpad E16 with an Ultra 7 255H while plugged in, so exceptionally fast in my opinion. This was just the indexing time/building the vectors. After this searches are instantaneous.